Lolcat from Facebook
I use elinks most of the times (Mostly along with Firefox). Elinks is real good as in speed and coolness. Even facebook thinks elinks is damn cool 
. Check out the screen shot below, which shows what happened when I tried to open facebook in elinks.
Merging multiple PDF files in Linux
I always had trouble maintaining multiple PDF's of same genre. A simple command - pdftk will do the trick of merging them together into a single PDF file. pdftk is present in Ubuntu repository itself.
Using the command is also very simple.
pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf ... cat output output.pdf
so if a.pdf, b.pdf so on are the pdf files u want to merge and the output file is combined.pdf then the command will be
pdftk a.pdf b.pdf cat output combined.pdf
Now if you a folder full of pdf files that you have to merge into a single pdf file , you can give something like
pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf
The only problem being that *.pdf might not take the input in the order you want. So you have to name the files such that doing an ls in the directory gives the files in the order in which you wanted them to be merged in the final output pdf file. say file00.pdf file01.pdf and so on.
The command liner !
Probably one of the features that amazes me in Linux are the power and cuteness of the command line applications ! Right now but for watching videos, working with images , I have found ways to do stuff entirely on the terminal. Whats better ?? Its fast - really fast and completly productive. Let me brief few of my recent infatuations in command line apps.
* Every wonder how fast your browser can be in Elinks ??? No pop ups, no images, but absoultely cool plain test views,option to see images using eog , tabbed browsing, history, bookmarks, history : everything one might need in a modern day browser. It doesnt crash , doesn't require extra plugins for working. Actually above anything else its the speed of browsing is what that beats me ! Too good. Check my gmail window in elinks 
* Okay , One thing Elinks might not have is the chat feature. But there is a better client than that. Finch : Welcome to the command line Pidgin. If you already new Pidgin, then Finch is the exact ditto for the shell and If you didn't know about Pidgin, u are missing something With Finch u can GTalk , AIM chat , yahoo , IRC , jabber talk and lots more. Once again the simplicity and speed beats any other application.
* And for everything there is Emacs plus shell combination. So the only thing I need the GUI is for watching videos and similar stuff where GUI is not a luxury but plain necessity.
* Of course I am still on the learning curve for Emacs and so sometimes when going gets tough I use Gedit. Now something great about gedit is that one can extend it in large ways to suit one's need. With a good GTKSourceview color scheme and font selection , coding can be a wonderful experience. (Gedit doesn't fit in command line tools, but sometimes its as much helpful )
I accept GUI has a friendly effect, simplicity of use. But what me miss is that after a few tries the command liners are simpler to use , more productive and damn cool , (particularly when you are showing off )
Google Summer of Code !
Well , this is something I am looking forward to get into. More than anything it gives the soc tag name which is so good to start with if someone is looking forward for an open source career. I am putting few applications in Gnome , KDE and Joomla and Ogre.
Whats more interesting and exciting is the big contacts one gets into. Now people like Naba Kumar, Anjuta IDE's lead developer and project head and the always helpful Nags(author of LDTP ), is in my google chat list. Isn't it just wonderful ? I wish , the list will increase in the coming years . To see your application/code being used by others and people raising comments/requests on it - the sense of satisfaction that arises out of it - I just love it . But one has to have some patience
PS : who said open source is charity ??
Pengufest ‘08
Too much happened during Pengufest '08. Lots of fun and lots of kelaas aka damages ! I cannot thank enough all the people who were a part of pengufest and the list is whole of GLUG-T! I really loved working with you guys and it was a wonderful learning experience for me conducting an event of this scale ! Wish I did more justice 
If I go into details , this would become a really very big post and so lets just skip all the stuff and all I will say is Pengufest 08 went well!
What else Does Linux Have other than a cool name ???
"Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I should use Linux over BSD?"
"No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical."
(Linus Torvalds' follow-up to a question about Linux)
Dial up in Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon
WOW ! ! Dial up is working in linux FOR me ! Well this might not be news for many , but yeah its a big one for me ! Without this i had been disconnected for more than one semester hols .
What did i do for making the dial-up work ??
Simple - Installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon ran wvdial - the gnome PPP dialer! it worked just out of the box ! All i had to know was to do was to add
my user name and password for the dial up connection ! sweet isn't it ??
1. sudo wvdialconf
this generated a wvdial configuration file for connecting to net using ur modem
2. sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf
change the username, password and dial up number in that file of my ISP .
3. sudo wvdial
it throws a lot of garbage and then finally obtains few DNS & IP addresses!
Then u can use firefox or any other application to connect to net ! thats all
Now after this , i also installed a gnome application called PPP dialer , which is a GUI for wvdial.
Just a day has passed since i came back home . Already two big things happened ! Hope hols have lots more for me
PS : the other thing is OGRE, which will be in another blog
GNU/Linux Stickers :)
These are two awesome GNU/Linux free stickers collections ! They are just so cute and nice. I am going to get a laptop just to paste them only
and the actual site i got it from is this
Meet GNU Linux ‘07
Meet GNU/Linux '07 is a small course introducing Linux to Beginners organized by third year students of GLUG-T, GNU Linux User Group Trichy. After two successful versions of MGL coordinated by Alagu and Hari in 05,06 respectively, I am coordinating the event this year. Already First batch is over and Second batch is due to start on coming monday.
Organizing this classes has given me a lot of mixed experiences. First i learnt that , i am not a good organizer as in I could have done a lot of things better. Got so many new friend's from my new year. The best part was we had a team working rather than i am the only person working ! The team includes Aditya Rao, Sreenivas Prasad,Viswanath, MSk, Vinod, Deepak, Madavan, Yazhini,Nishad, Vinod,Ankit and Anshu Prateek. All of them great in their own way. I mean i never thought i will have the privilege of working with all of them at the same time .Whats better we had fun. We went for few treats and had some fun also there. I dont deny we had some problems here and then but mostly it went well taking it into account that I was new to this organizing stuff and all !!
Here is a small gist of what all happened during the five days!!
Day - 1:
I stated the session with Introduction into Linux showing them demo of my Beryl 3D Desktop and other features. Unfortunately in our college we don't have a proper common Linux lab. So had to run VNC from two main Linux servers. Then the session had to be followed by Srinivas Prasad on basics of Linux shell. Well he did start it , but then i got a bit hyped up and joined him taking the class (Something which i later regretted i should not have done though that session )went fine !!And not to forget something really funny -Anshu took a marker pen and wrote a big A on the projector screen while he got carried away explaining something !!
Day -2 :
Vishwa explained about Linux file hierarchy very cleanly. It was followed by Aditya Rao and Vinod who shared between them explaining various applications in Linux. Then Deepak started explaining how to programme in Linux using gcc and gedit. I dont know what happend after that - the vnc's started crashing and we were getting funny errors. Deepak's session was really cool - he was explaining every point. It was my mistake, should have tested the VNC sessions beforehand
Day - 3:
Madavan started with the Files, users and permissions and thankfully VNC's worked properly and first time people asking doubts and this was were myself learnt a few things.Madavans's session as expected was great ! His knack of putting things was really nice . The session was followed by MSK's demonstration on Gimp and Gparted. Then it was followed by Ankit's Linux in LAN. As such day 3 went really nice without any problems.
Day - 4 :
By far the best sessions were on Day4. Yazhini explained advanced shell commands in shell like cut,tr and stuff ! It was nice and i learnt most of them only then. Followed by Nishad who took on shell scripting. And in the beginning we taught them vim also so that instead of gedit they can use vim to edit files. and Deepak just had revisited on his earlier programming session but people tried out this time !! Day 4 was the best !! and as such there were funny incidents like Nishad telling things like "the commads are case sensitive that is, it is not case insensitive" and yazhini like "can any one answer my question?? , oh no u cant" even without pausing to ask
Day -5 :
Sreenivas and Msk taught python the first session . Other were preparing a online test . Earlier we had announced a Glugt Tshirt to toppers of the test. But the test was a complete fiasco as the test module I used suddenly was not working.Quoting hari "Murphy is God". Then we announced the tests will be held later and then I rounded off the session with telling them how to install Linux.
We also had an anonymous feedback webpage which was great but for a few which were like "suren is a moron" and stuff like that. We gave them a printed booklet for future reference and also distributed fedora-7 dvd for all those who participated. All participants will get a participants certificate. We took a total charge of Rs 250 per head for the whole class and I guess on the whole it was worth it but given some more time i could have had few more sessions. But as students even we have our own limitations and third year is hectic already.
As such i am happy that, we pulled of something of this magnitude and more importantly we now have a nice working team . Hope to do better for second batch.
Nice fonts in Linux
How to add nice cool, clean fonts in Linux!! its so simple !! Get all the true type fonts from net (or better take it from the fonts folder from your windows ) and copy them to /usr/share/fonts/default probably with a prefix so that you can remove them later in case of a need. Thats all !! Now just use open office , all the fonts you copied are right there !!
Found this when I did this poster for MGL
